Brett Easton Ellis: Portrait of the author as a hungry young man

“Now, who cares?”

And yet here we are, talking about The Shards, a new Bret Easton Ellis novel. His first for 13 years. Nearly 600 incredibly moreish pages of rich, hot teens, sex, violence and anomie, all tricked out in Ellis’s trademark deadpan prose. It’s a dreamy, homoerotic horror story that mixes pool parties with a serial killer narrative, all recalled 40 years after the event by the book’s narrator and main character. His name? Oh yeah, he’s called Bret. And he’s a writer.

For many of us, it seemed the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, American literature’s “prince of darkness”, had long been lost to Hollywood, writing scripts that rarely got made. That’s when he wasn’t condemning cancel culture and calling millennials “Generation Wuss” online and in print – depending on your perspective, either speaking truth to power or showing himself up as, the critic Christopher Bollen once suggested, a “bullying, over-privileged grump”.

For a while there in the midst of all this it looked like the novelist had gone missing in action.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, it’s been 13 years. Has it taken you 13 years to write? What have you been doing?’ Nothing. There was no novel,” he explains this morning.

And then one night in April 2020, after an evening when he had started playing oldies from the early 1980s on YouTube and trying (and failing) to track down online a couple of guys he knew back then and a girlfriend he had at Buckley, the private school he attended back in the day, he typed out a page or two.

“And then the next day I wrote 14 pages and the thing just flowed.”

He wrote it, serialised it on his podcast and thought that was enough. “Who is going to read a 600-page novel is my feeling. But my agent liked it and my publisher wanted to publish it and … Hooray, it’s coming out.”

There’s little sign of over-privileged grumpiness on show today, even when he is at his most outspoken.The reality is Ellis is an open, often funny conversationalist, even when you don’t agree with what he is saying.

The Shards is an immersive read, albeit one that requires a strong stomach at times.

It plunges us into privileged LA life in 1981. Parents are either absent or predatory. Their teenage offspring are mobile, mall-obsessed and sexually active.

It’s a deep dive into the past and more specifically Ellis’s own past. Has he arrived at the point in life where yesterday is more interesting than today or tomorrow?

“Definitely. Oh my God, so much more interesting.”

And this book is about his own past. How much of the Bret in this novel is him?

“More than any other book I’ve written. But every book is me, every narrator is me. Every book is a reflection of where I was when I wrote the book.

“They are my stories about my emotional self and my psychological self.

“No different with The Shards. This is a book narrated, you have to remember, by a 57-58-year-old man. That’s me.”

Actually, The Shards is a story that he tried to write when he was a teenager, inspired by his own realisation that being a writer could be dangerous, that your imagination could reorder and distort your actual experiences.

“I was pretending things were happening and I was pretending to be a boyfriend and I was making up stuff,” he tells me now.

“As a writer I thought I was a character in a drama. It was painful, but a good lesson to learn. I lost some friends and I lost some people close to me because I was just a little … I don’t know … Hungry for something. A different world, sort of.

“I wanted the world to be different.”

How do you feel about that younger version of yourself, I ask him.

“Oh, I like him. In some ways I’m still that person. I do think there is something to be said … That old adage that you are frozen at the age you become well known and you don’t successfully age out of it. You kind of stay there forever. I feel that way sometimes. I try my best not to. I try my best to become an adult; be a man and take care of stuff.

“But I like that guy a lot. I do. He had a more full life than I think he thought he did at 17. He thought huge things were missing. They really weren’t.

“But you feel that way at 17. Everything is so dramatic, everything is like: ‘Live or die! Love or hate!’ That’s just part of being young.

“Throw being a writer into that and being gay and my God, you have an explosive situation.”

The Bret in the book is hiding his sexuality, but Ellis says the teenage version of him had a decent handle on that back then. Probably.

“It was never a torturous thing to me. I never came out to anybody until way later when I lived in New York. It wasn’t a big thing. I never felt as tortured as the Bret in the book feels at times.

“Or maybe I did. I don’t know.”

Ellis was just 21 and still a student when his first novel, Less Than Zero, was published and he became famous – and, if the theory is right, frozen.

“I think I was prepared for it for the first year when everyone is really nice to you and when the tide began to turn that’s when I started having anxiety attacks.

“People get tired of you. They want a different story.

“And also you realise a character has been created. It isn’t you. It’s a notion of you. You kind of die and the brand takes over: ‘Yuppie prince of darkness’. ‘Bad boy’.”

He shrugs. “What do you do?” We talk about violence for a moment. It’s the part of the novel I struggled with most. Maybe I’m just squeamish, but I want to ask him what is the purpose of violence in his work?

“It’s just one of those things I’m drawn to, always in my fiction. Why? I don’t know. It’s not a moral thing. It’s not an ideological thing. It’s an aesthetic preference.

“I was talking to someone about Philip Roth and he likes to have scenes of glove-making. In American Pastoral that went on for three or four pages. I’m interested in serial killers.”

It’s striking, I say, how absent the parents are for the most part in The Shards.

“We were left alone more than I would suppose today’s kids are,” he admits. “We went out. There was a lot of freedom.”

This turns out to be a cue. “I think one of the reasons why Gen X is the most conservative, right-leaning of all generations is because we grew up in immense freedom. No-one told us what to say, how to think. Offensive is good. We want to be offended. Offensive is art.”

That conservatism, he suggests, is a reaction to the rules now in place, “the language police, cancel culture”.

We can argue about those terms, of course, but surely as a gay man he can accept that things are better now for young queer kids than back then?

“I don’t know about that. But I also do like the world of the gay rebel, that underground gay world that was not homogenised and slipped into the heterosexual mainstream. I like that world.

“When you talk to certain people about that world who were there it’s really kind of an amazing place. Hollywood was an awesome place if you just kept underground and in the closet.

“The whole teeming life of these men in this secret place … When I read reminiscences of this I get a little nostalgic. Instead of seeing shiny, smiley twinks holding up Gay Parade flags. That’s not my notion of what masculine homosexuality is.

“I get what you’re saying and all, but I have a different slant on it.”

I ask him one more question about that 17-year-old boy he was. What about that younger man feels furthest away and what remains close?

“What feels furthest away? Well, my youth. I definitely miss that body. And that way of just bursting to do things and feeling passionate.

“What seems closest? Well, to a strong degree the urge to write, to create. That has always stayed with me. That never diminished.

“Whatever I was doing in the 13 years between novels was also writing. More than I had ever written in my life. It was just, unfortunately, for Hollywood, which is, when you realise you’re not going to win at the casino, a terrible mistake.

“But you think you are going to win. You think you’re going to get the hand.”

Now that he has returned to novel writing, will there be more? “You know what? I actually wrote one. A short one. I don’t know if I want to do anything with it. I think I’d like to do something with it. I did write it in the voice of a woman and I do think that’s problematic right now. It shouldn’t be.

“And I do want to do a book like Tarantino has done on cinema [Cinema Speculation]. I want to do a similar thing about the movies of my childhood, what they meant to me, the stories around those movies.”

The past again, he notes, smiling.

“Going back into the past. Not the future.”

I leave him there, beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis is published by Swift Press, £25, on Tuesday